23/07/2019

How does Facial Recognition Software(FRS) work?

  1. Your face is captured in a photo or on video
  2. FRS reads the geometry of your face - 68 different facial features
  3. FRS matches your face to a stored image or determines something about you

FRS learns to do this though machine learning and being fed data sets of images

What are the uses of FRS?

  • Security - police, airports
  • Authentication - unlocking mobile phones
  • Social media - Facebook photo tagging, animoji
  • Marketing - smart billboards, targeted advertising
  • State control - tracking the Uighur population in China, social credit scores

Microsoft Azure demo

What happens when FRS gets it wrong?

Problems with Bias and Accuracy

  • Joy Buolamwini used a FRS in her project which did not recognize her - only worked when she wore a white mask
  • She then ran a study to evaluate how well FRS does at identifying gender in people with different skin colours
  • Error rate was 0.8% for white men - 20-35% for black women
  • This is due to the data sets fed into the FRS - largely white and male faces

Problems with Privacy

  • Loss of anonymity - government can track you anywhere e.g Chinese jaywalkers
  • Police have tracked and arrested protesters using FRS
  • No legislation to make police in the USA remove your image from their database
  • Image databases are vulnerable to hackers
  • What can be done with your image?

Regulation - Legislation

  • GDPR - covers biometric data as a “special category” and specifically mentions “facial images”
  • This means you have to have explicit consent or a really good reason to use it
  • Biometric Information Privacy Act (Illinois) - less restrictive then GDPR
  • Users must be transparent in how they are using FRS - but doesn’t apply to the police
  • FRS banned entirely in San Francisco and Oakland

Ban Facial Recognition Map

Improving the Datasets

  • Self reporting - Face Recognition Vendor Test

  • Algorithmic Justice League - Safe Face Pledge
  • Best practices - transparency, testing for fairness and accuracy, asking for consent
  • Or maybe take a more personal approach…

Conclusion

Facial Recognition Software should be regulated - but how?

The datasets used to train FRS need to be more inclusive and representative of the population

Legislation ensuring self-reporting of bias and errors for all developers and sellers of FRS

BIPA seems like a good compromise to address privacy issues while allowing wider use